Would you be brave enough to stop a child being kidnapped?

We all like to see ourselves as heroes but how would you react if you were put to the test?

Yousef Erakat decided to find out by mocking up a child abduction scenario to see how members of the public coped when they were faced with a potential kidnapper.

The mixed bag of results appears in the US video The Kidnapping Children Experiment – an idea which was inspired by Erakat’s somewhat irrational fear of being abducted when he was young.

In the video the child, who is played by an actor called Nathan, approaches several adults telling them a man is trying to put him in his car and asks them to phone his mother. Moments later a man appears claiming to be the boy’s father and tries to take him away.

More often than not Nathan was ignored but one woman pepper-sprayed the ‘would-be’ kidnapper, forcing the cameraman to come clean about the experiment before she inflicted further damage.